August Jackson is a co-chair for the SCIP09 annual conference and on his blog he's asked the following:
For one of the side projects I'm working on, I'm trying to sell the notion of giving away what could be considered "premium" content as a mechanism to raise interest and broaden an established brand among interested non-consumers. Specifically I am trying to make the case that giving away some audio recordings of presentations from an annual professional conference will stimulate interest in the following year's conference.
In reality my concept is more nuanced than simply giving away content. The conference will be held next April, and I am advocating that we make audio recordings of the sessions that will be presented (pending presenter's agreement, of course). Paying attendees will be given access to the recorded content for no cost following the conference. Those who did not register for the conference will be able to purchase the content as a price well under the cost of conference registration (I'm playing with price points between 1/10 and 1/5 of the cnference registration cost). Three to four months before the next year's conference (set for April 2010) we would make some (probably not all) of the recorded content available for free.
The remainder of his post fleshes out his thinking and provides a couple of examples of successful content giveaways that have not cannibalized paid attendance. He's asking for comments and definitely read the post and share your thoughts if you can.
I tried to comment but for some reason couldn't get it accepted by August's comment system (not sure why) so I thought I'd share them here. First, I don't see any problem in providing the content for free at a later date. There's a definite perception that the value of presentations decrease over time so I don't think you'll hear many paid attendees complaining, and I think that August is right when he argues that a large part of the value equation in attending conferences is found in the face-to-face networking and you just don't get that from online video.
Another reason I think it's a good idea is that having the presentations available on SCIP's site will increase traffic exponentially. If they're smart they'll add features that allow for video sharing (think YouTube) and incorporate some viral components so that SCIP's conference, and by extension SCIP, are promoted via blogs such as this one.
SCIP's had an ongoing debate re. capturing video of sessions, and one stumbling block has been the cost of contracting a company that provides this kind of service. With current technology I hope that this becomes less of an issue, and I would urge them to even consider doing something fairly low quality (i.e. a few digital cams with external mics) rather than nothing at all. People don't expect perfection online these days and as long as the content is relatively discernible they'll have made a step in the right direction.
In his post August mentions that he's playing with the idea of charging a price for access to the online videos up until a certain point and then making them free after that. I have some ideas to add to his:
- Make certain videos free from the get-go. Just one or two to keep the buzz of the conference going.
- Make all videos free to SCIP members behind the SCIP firewall, similar to what they do with magazine articles. Perhaps there's a 3-6 month delay in doing this so that there's still a premium for attending the conference. It's always a good idea to have more membership benefits.
- If you're going to charge for the video then forget what I said about lower quality being better than no video at all.
- Sell sponsorships of each presentation, and by extension the video.
If you have any other ideas make sure you head over to August's blog and share them.
